


(Like Catching) Sunlight In A Jar

by Laliandra



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: F/M, M/M, unapologetic fix it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:04:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/pseuds/Laliandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where Dustin meets Amy at a party instead of Sean. Or, Amelia Ritter Fixes This Fuckery With The Power of her Awesome...</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Like Catching) Sunlight In A Jar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daisysusan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/gifts).



> Once upon a time I promised Maggie a Thing and the thing was some cute Dustin/Amy AUs and then this happened and is still happening because it still isn't finished. But it will be! This is a Shaming Myself Into Finishing post. And also my whole twitter feed accidentally opened up the never healed wound of our TSN feelings, and it was partly my fault, and I felt bad. S.o here, have some summer set fix it fic.

Amy’s not sure what makes her talk to him. It’s a big party and there are plenty of people she knows there, but she watches the guy bounce from group to group, telling stories with increasingly extravagant gestures and before she knows it she’s telling him her name and her major (cliché but effective) and waiting for him to do the same.

“Dustin,” he says, “I study...” and pauses. He opens his mouth, closes it again. 

“Please tell me you have a major,” she says. Fuck. “Please tell me you’re not someone’s high schooler little brother.”

He pulls a face, mouth going into a weirdly perfect diagonal line. “Shit, tell me I don’t look that young. I am totally old enough to have a major. I mean, I do have a major. It’s economics.” 

“Why the pause, then?” she asks. 

He looks around, steps closer.

“The thing is, Amy-only-Amelia-when-you’re-in-trouble, I’m a spy. An interloper. Not From Round Here.” He lowers his voice. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually from Harvard.”

Amy laughs. “You’re not a very good spy, are you? What if I turned you in to the authorities?”

“You _wouldn’t_ ,” Dustin says, all big eyes and mock outrage. “Don’t you know what they do to nice boys like me?”

“I do have very strong school spirit,” Amy tells him. The lights are dim and the music is loud, so she leans in. Dustin has freckles, almost too light to see. “Stanford through and through.”

“I’m not really a spy,” he promises, sounding far too earnest. “It’s more of a... A reconnaissance mission.” 

“What for?” Amy asks, and Dustin’s whole face lights up. 

He tells her about thefacebook, about his friends who are creating something from nothing. He tries not to but he ends up praising them anyway, Mark and his genius (“Don’t tell him I said that”), and Eduardo and his strategies, and Chris and his brilliance. His voice goes different; brighter and softer all at once.

And his enthusiasm is infectious, and Amy’s always been sort of a tech nerd. Okay, really a tech nerd. She probably can’t get away with saying ‘sort of’ with the amount of articles about IP law she’s read recently. So she finds herself saying, “That sounds, holy shit, that sounds incredible.”

“Wardo said they should see it in Palo Alto and Mark wants to expand to Stanford and... I’ve got a friend from high school who goes to school here and so...” Dustin shrugs. She pulls him down to sit on the sofa, kicking off her heels and crossing her legs underneath her. 

She says, “And what have you found out, Dustin-not-really-a-spy-from-Harvard. How are things looking over here?”

Dustin looks her up and down and grins mischievously. “Oh, don’t...” she starts and Dustin raises his eyebrows and nods. 

“Oh yes,” he says. “Pretty great from where I’m sitting.”

Amy shakes her head. “I hope you are feeling a whole lot of shame right now.”

Dustin , says, “I know, I know, dishonour on my cow. Can I get you a drink to make up for it?”

“It’s a party, you just pick up a cup of something from the table. That’s right there,” Amy points out.

Dustin leans backwards over the arm of the sofa, revealing pale skin as he stretches out, and he has a lego tee shirt and Amy smiles while he’s not looking. 

“It’s definitely a cup of _something_ ,” he says, proffering it to her. Amy peers into it suspiciously. When she looks up Dustin is holding two bottles of beers. “Maybe safer?” he says.

Amy takes one and chinks it against his. “Tell me more about your baby,” she says.

*

It’s already really sunny when Amy wakes up, which is never a good sign. She feels weirdly hot and her mouth is all dry and ugh, this always happens when she goes to one of Laura’s parties. 

Although the hot thing might have something to do with the guy - Dustin - who is burritoed up in her blankets next to her and is giving off more warmth than her space heater. 

She remembers drinking the rest of his cup of the Something. And then offering to walk him home and yeah, kissing him up against a street lamp which is not so classy but definitely not the worst place she’s made out with someone, she’s in college, sue her.

They must have got back to her place somehow, because she’s got this clear flash of them sitting on the edge of her bed looking at Dustin’s site, clean and seductive in blue and white, and her saying, “I would go on this _every day_.” And then Dustin putting his hand on her jaw, surprisingly steady and gentle, turning her face away from the screen and kissing her.

Things go a bit dizzying after that, which sounds sort of romance novel-ish and it sort of unfortunately was. Also alcohol hazed but whatever. Dustin refused to get under the covers with her, so, oh yeah, she was the one who wrapped him up in the blanket ‘to protect his maidenly virtue.’

“Hey,” she says, and tries to poke him through the layers.

Dustin turns and peers at her through one eye. “Mmmpf?” he asks.

Amy says, “Good morning, sunshine.” 

Dustin gives her and the world at large a betrayed look. Amy grins in spite of herself and goes to get a drink. She’s halfway across the room when Dustin calls, “Hey, wait, wow, I slept with you?”

Amy calls, “Technically you slept next to me,” back over her shoulder, trying to find some pants. There must be pants somewhere. She definitely owns some.

“Still,” she hears Dustin say. She can’t really parse his tone so she turns back to frown at him. He’s sitting up, looking small in the mass of bedding, his hair a wreck but his smile so, so good.

Dustin shrugs. “It’s still a big deal! I mean, come on. You’re really hot.”

“Yes,” Amy says. “Yes I am. Do you want some water? Juice?”

Dustin rubs a hand across his face. He says, “Oh, fuck, I’ll take anything; my mouth feels like something’s died in it. And then come back to life, gone on a killing spree, dragged its zombiefied prizes back into my mouth and they’ve all fed on my tongue.”

“Maybe juice, then,” Amy muses. 

“Also when you said you were Stanford through and through, I didn’t know you meant down to your underwear,” Dustin says. Amy shimmies slightly as she heads back across the room. 

They don’t bother to get fully dressed (and no, Dustin doesn’t have Harvard boxers), just curl back up under the covers with OJ and a box of Cheezits that Amy digs out. They balance her laptop on Dustin’s knees and he takes her on a proper tour of thefacebook. Dustin drops into code speak with the ease of someone who thinks in two languages, Amy knows the signs. But when she asks him about it he laughs and says, “Nah, I only started classes recently. I got a book, taught myself one weekend when it looked like Mark was going to kill himself coding.”

“Holy shit,” Amy mutters to herself, because she’s plenty smart but, _woah_. 

Dustin smiles to himself. “Yeah, Mark isn’t really very good with normal human concepts like eating and not staying awake for longer than twenty four hours. And he’s kind of...” Dustin frowns. “Er. Freakishly possessive.”

“I had noticed his face and his name all over the site,” Amy says. “And that was the polite version?”

“Yeah,” Dustin says, pulling a face. 

Amy traces her finger along the bar at the top. “I know some people who would be very interested in this,” she says.

* 

They email when Dustin goes back to Cambridge. A lot. It’s a bit of a mood whiplash. There are the emails she sends to Dustin - and that he ccs mzuckerberg, esaverin and chughes into at relevant points - that she forwards to her business major friends and tech blogs, the ones where Dustin talks about products and tech and uses terms that she has to google. And then there are the other ones, the endless conversations about action movies, the stories she tells him about France, the stupid marching band jokes he makes and the shit she gives him about his taste in music. Amy likes both of these Dustins. Kind of a lot.

A month or so later he sends her an invite to facebook for the brand new Stanford network. It comes with an email from Mark about beta testing features, another one from Eduardo how to use it to make other people want to use it too, and one from Chris that just says, “He insisted, but I couldn’t think of anyone better anyway.” 

Chris’s email signature is one long mass of impressive titles from various societies, but the most important thing he’ll ever be to Amy is Dustin’s best friend. 

*

Amy’s not the ultimate trendsetter or anything but she knows a lot of people and knows how to be clever with them. She calls in some favours and suddenly the cooler blogs of the Valley are alive with sound of thefacebook. She mentions it to her friends, classmates, band members, but in passing. Oh, yeah, I’ll facebook you about it. You don’t have facebook? I thought everyone had facebook? Sure, I’ll send you a link.”

Thefacebook’s a charmer, anyway, and always gets a second date. She tells Dustin this and he makes her promise to never put it that way to Mark because “he already anthropomorphizes that thing more than is healthy”.

She gets a weekly email from Mark with Stanford’s numbers on it, and each one makes her want to punch the air. The whole thing is _extraordinary_ and she’s there, frontier pioneer, her very own Manifest Destiny in Relationship statuses, profiles and user stats. 

And then all of a sudden they are coming out, coming to her city, as announced in a formal email and an exclamation mark riddled one. Dustin is coming back! Bringing Mark! And interns! He is totally going to live in a house with a pool! And wear his Harvard tee shirts all of the time!

She emails him back, says, yay, yay, I’ll be there, I’ll burn them. 

*

“You realise I’m only here for the pool, right,” Amy says, when Dustin points out that this the third time she’s ‘dropped round’ this week. 

He says, “I see no swimsuit,” looking her up and down. She’s not brought a bag, just has her cell and keys stuffed into her shorts pockets. For all of term time she carries a book bag and laptop and sometimes a large brass instrument. The summer is the time for more freedom and less back pain. 

Amy gives him the same careful once over. The thing about Dustin is that he really has no sexual agenda most of the time, but it doesn’t mean she won’t call him on it. Or mess with him. “Maybe I’m planning on skinny dipping.”

Dustin makes a small noise that is mostly vowels. 

She keeps thinking that today will be the day that one of them makes a move, goes beyond the flirting that has reached a sort of ludicrous level and actually just goes for it. They’ve already hooked up. This is stupid. And never let it be said that Amy Ritter doesn’t go for what she wants. But, this, all of it, it feels too big to dive into... Dustin flirts back but he’s never done anything more, and she knows he thinks she’s hot but that’s not...

That’s not them. The “us” that they are and could be. 

She wonders, suddenly, if he knows that _she_ thinks _he’s_ hot, because she does. He’s the kind of guy that people would call cute, do call cute. And he’s sweet and funny and a weirdly _good_ person but sometimes she looks at him and thinks, well, _damn_.

The pool’s great and all, but she’s here so often because it’s pretty much impossible to have a bad day with Dustin making up a part of it.

_Oh Amelia_ , she thinks to herself, because she’s in trouble.

“I have a bikini on under here,” she tells Dustin, and drags him out to the pool. They pick Mark up on the way, not literally this time, because despite what he claims he needs vitamin D like the rest of the world.

The three of them sit under the ‘umbrella’ that is really a weird construct of blankets and poles, and Amy and Mark trade words in French and Mandarin, pointing at objects until one of them can’t name something. Dustin keeps score.

“You know, I could just cheat,” Mark says, when he gets a point for knowing ladder when Amy can’t remember it. “It’s not like either of you know.”

“You wouldn’t though,” Dustin says through a yawn. 

“Nah,” Amy agrees. “You get all ‘the thrill of victory’ about things...”

“S’why you like fencing,” Dustin finishes. 

Mark gives them a bit of a strange look. “I should...” he says, and starts to get up.

“Are you quitting just because you’re a point ahead?” Amy asks, too sundrenched-lazy to really put any bite into it.

Mark says, “Some of us aren’t only in Palo Alto to swim in other people’s pools, you know.” His mouth twitches with that Mark thing that on anyone else would be a grin. Amy isn’t sure if Mark knows that she still has classes, does have a job - waitressing, oh the glamour. You can never quite tell, with Mark.

Amy waves a hand. “Yes, yes, go change the future of human interaction. Mark and his facebook.”

Dustin mutters something that sounds suspiciously like, “You and _your_ facebook.”

Amy says, “You’re getting your articles wrong, it’s The facebook.”

“I’ve always thought the “the” was sort of unnecessary,” Dustin says, rolling onto his front to look up at Mark.

“Sean Parker said on his blog that the best websites are the most pared down in all aspects,” Amy says. 

Dustin sighs. “That guy is not the messiah, Amy.” 

She laughs, says, “No, he’s a very naughty boy.”

Mark is stock still, frozen half turned to go back to the house. He whispers something under his breath. 

When Dustin notices that Mark is standing there frozen, he pushes him into the pool.

*

The problem with the House of Facebook is that they’re all in too deep. It seems like the end of the world if they stop working on the site for even a minute, which is why Amy keeps finding them passed out asleep at four in the afternoon, or eating dry ramen. Which, ew. They live in a bubble where this is more important than anything else, and she can see how. She’ll drop round, not planning to stay long, and Dustin will show her a new feature and then she’ll end up asking more and making suggestions and then calling Chris about it. And then Mark will start asking who some tech guy is and... And then it’s four hours later.

It’s not that it she dislikes being here, with people who are smart and funny and just don’t give a shit. They’re probably going to become millionaires, if they don’t kill themselves first, and Amy will laugh herself sick.

But she’s got a life outside of this house, outside of facebook. A little perspective. She’s staying her course and sticking to her plan, and that certainly doesn’t involve obsession or addiction.

She can usually get Dustin to stop being ‘wired in’ and relax, but he forgets when she’s not there, and they’re all _useless_ and she can’t keep track of a whole house. Chris and Eduardo are both too far away to be really helpful, until Chris jokingly suggests a sleep rota. 

Amy makes them do it, gets all four of them in on it, because they actually know how much time facebook takes up, and Mark wants a certain amount of people working at all times, but there’s no reason not to put in shift patterns.

Eduardo makes tables and contingency plans, even though he always sounds exhausted himself. Dustin worries about him, Amy can catch it in the tone of his voice, just from the way he says, “Wardo,” wistful and concerned, and her stomach clenches. But they can’t make Eduardo sleep from the other side of the country. Amy is going to deal with the problems in front of her, which are currently unwashed boys in unconscious heaps.

The rotas are colour coded because that’s who Eduardo Saverin is, and they have things on them like eating and grocery shopping and _breaks_. Chris gets a box of alarm clocks delivered and it works, just about, keeps them all just on the right side of manic.

Mark still codes for too long and just sleeps during his breaks, but it’s better. If they skip, they skip, Amy’s not their mom. She’s tried to save everyone before, ever the cliche of the Child of an Addict, and she doesn’t even have a cape to show for that horrific burn out.

She can’t help it, though, with Dustin, takes him on a walk round the city, or drives out to campus with him and shows him the sights, the wider world. 

They usually end up back to her place, Amy gets something fresh from the deli and they watch a movie and Amy thinks, maybe today. 

And then, maybe tomorrow.

It’s usually when they are getting to the end of the movie and one or both of them has started to slump. Amy knows the warmth and the shape of Dustin’s body too well, a many layered sense memory that is too connected to her also knowing the shape of his mouth. Tonight Dustin snuffles into her shoulder and she wants to kiss the top of his head. Again. Always.

“Now is not the scheduled time for sleep, Moscovitz,” she says to him. He turns his head to glare up at her, and she’s not thinking anything at all when she kisses him.

Dustin makes a contented noise into her mouth as he slides his hand under her hair.

“Yeah?” she says, nonsensically. Only not.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I don’t know why we stopped doing this but can we not again? Stop, I mean.”

Amy pulls off her tee shirt and takes advantage of Dustin’s (understandable) moment of distraction to push him down so that they’re lying on her sofa, and he kisses her hard like a last-gasp last chance.

“That was an okay, by the way,” Amy says. When she leans in to kiss him again her hair falls in the way and her necklace bangs against his nose, but his smile is wide beneath her lips and his hands are certain on her waist.

“Deal,” he says.

*

No one notices that they’re dating for more than a week, which, yeah, that’s pretty telling.

Well, they’ve always sat too close. Dustin is kinda touch-happy, plus he and Mark and Chris are used to living on top of each other, so personal space doesn’t really factor into his life or thinking. 

And Amy doesn’t like to stereotype but it’s not like this house is filled with people who are particularly great with the nuances of human interaction. That’s just a fact. She has gotten to know them all as people, has moved beyond the simplistic view of them as computer nerds, etc etc, and so she can say this.

Dustin is passing Amy his box of Lucky Charms. There’s no milk, so they’re just eating them out of the box, trading it back and forth across the table. Well, it used to be a table but the top got smashed so now it’s more of a board. On table legs. 

Mark comes to stand, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, wearing yesterday’s clothes and a look of bleary belligerence. He tends to do that a lot, stand just off to one side, observing. But after Dustin hands Amy over the box he makes a small startled sound, and come to sit next to Dustin, dragging a chair over. He bumps Dustin’s shoulder and Dustin turns, smiles and says, “I know.” 

Mark rolls his eyes. “You could do better, you know,” he says to Amy. Oh. She doesn’t know what clued Mark in, or how he conveyed that to Dustin.

“I don’t know about that,” she says, and watches Dustin go still. “You’re going to make him a bajillionaire, right?” Dustin pulls a face at her but his eyes are sharp-bright, happy.

Mark says, with that clear, almost harsh certainty of his, “Yes.”

Dustin slings an arm around Mark’s shoulders and looks unashamedly proud. “We’re all going to make each other bajillionaires, thank you very much. This is not a one man show.”

Mark says, “You tell the guy he’s no longer expendable and this happens. I’m pretty sure you’re not making anyone money by sitting out here making eyes at your girlfriend and not stealing her marshmallows. And Amy, we might be able to use you again.” He picks up his coffee and shuffles back inside.

Dustin grins at her. “That’s a thank you from Mark. Welcome to the facebook family, Miss Ritter.” 

Amy moves into the chair that Mark had pulled up and presses close. “Well, that makes this a bit weird now that you’ve said that,” 

Dustin puts a hand on her thigh. “I think I’ll manage to get past it.” 

Dustin’s mouth tastes sweet, cereal and apple juice, and she can’t help making a small noise, wanting to get closer. Amy slides over until she sitting on one leg because they like each other, fuck it, why shouldn’t she, they’re alone out here and Dustin is gorgeously happy about her taking the initiative.

He says, “Do you want to stay for the day?”

*

It becomes a Thing. It’s handy to have somewhere to stay that’s closer to work. Even if she and Dustin have to cram into a single bed and sometimes when they get to his room there’s already someone asleep on the floor. Dustin still gives out more heat than one person should, and they have to choose a position to sleep in and then stick with it. 

Amy wakes up in the mornings, stuck to the sheets and to Dustin with sweat, and she always wants to kiss the back of his neck.

*

Amy goes on a break at work and finds 5 missed calls from Mark.

He picks up almost instantly. “I was going to ask if you knew a shortcut to the airport but there’s no point now because I’m nearly there now, what exactly is the point of having a cell phone if you don’t answer it, also the fact that you giggle on your machine message makes you sound like a child who’s been given a cell by their parents in case debate club runs late.” 

“Mark, fuck, are you running late? Dustin put Eduardo on your rota.” With tiny hearts around his name but Mark doesn’t seem to have noticed them so she’s not going to bring it up.

Dustin loves his friends through loyalty, shared interests and unstoppable, no-holds-barred mockery.

“Like, half an hour late,” Mark dismisses. Amy sighs and leans against the wall. There’s rain drumming against the window, a summer storm come in from the sea, sudden and knock-out hard.

She says, “You’d better get there before he tries to take a cab in this.” 

Mark says, “I’ll be there, Amy, jeez,” and hangs up. 

*

Dustin is waiting in the parking lot for her when her shift finishes, wearing an amazingly dorky anorak. He opens an umbrella over her with a flourish. “Can I walk you home, fair lady?”

Amy smiles and takes his arm. “You know you can wait in the kitchen, right?” She’d left Dustin in there about five minutes while she went to collect her tips and by the time she’d got back he was, predictably, everyone’s new favourite friend.

Dustin shrugs with one shoulder, a weird small echo version of his usual one. “Didn’t really feel like it. I’d only drip on people, anyway. And then someone would slip on the water while carrying a large tray of something and before you know it the whole thing has become a really bad comedy sketch and everyone’s covered in mashed potato.”

Amy says, “I don’t think we serve mashed potato, Dustin.”

He shakes his head a little, and says quietly, “Life is constantly out to ruin my artistic vision.”

The rain is getting lighter, drumming on the top of the umbrella, a bass line to their conversation. 

“Did Mark get Eduardo back alright?” she asks. A Dustin of small movements and non social urges is usually one that’s not okay.

Dustin breathes out for an impressively long time. He says, “For a given value of alright. One with slamming doors and not very well suppressed yelling.”

“Really?” Amy says, confused. Mark’s been smiling to himself ever since Eduardo said he was coming out. “What about?”

“Oh, the same fight they’ve been having for the last three months. Wardo’s in New York, Mark and facebook are here,” Dustin says, sighing again. “Which is actually the same fight they’ve been having forever; they’re too important to each other. And aren’t good with that. At that.”

Amy stops them, pulls Dustin to a stop with her hand on his arm. “I thought you were... You weren’t just teasing Mark about that?” 

He smiles at her, sweet but _so_ perceptive. “Nope. Well, I was, but...” 

Amy says, “You know you can’t mock Mark into action, right?”

It’s so like Dustin to think that he could, but Mark is probably one of the only people who can out-stubborn him. 

Dustin pulls a face, scrunching up one cheek. “It’s worth trying, though,” he says, and she doesn’t know if he meant it to come out that sincere.

She presses her nose into the warm space where his scarf meets his skin, her boy who dresses for Boston winters in California. He wraps one arm around and he sighs, a little too deeply. He shouldn’t be worrying about the future of a company and tangled webs of code, and just for a second she wants him to be back in his Kirkland dorm, warm and dry and relatively careless.

It’s selling him short, Amy knows, because Dustin also deserves to be on the verge of brilliance, and this is everything he wants. 

He wraps an arm around her, and they stand there, under the stupid umbrella like something from a movie, a moment of shared warmth in the never-quite-dark of the city.

“I’m sort of enjoying this and laughing at us, at the same time,” Dustin says into her hair.

Amy kisses his neck and says, “Baby, we contain multitudes.”

*

Meeting Eduardo is strange, almost like meeting a fictional character from a well known book. Amy feels like she knows him; she’s listened to countless stories about him, seen his work everywhere, hears his name all the time.

He’s a part of her everyday, of the making of facebook and of Dustin and Mark.

But he’s still the only one of the facebook people that she’s never actually met, never progressed beyond emails about planning and productivity (and Mark and Dustin’s sleeping habits) when there’s no one else involved. 

Amy isn’t sure who she’s expecting; the Wardo of Kirkland myth who passes out after two glasses of wine and makes amazing paper airplanes and dresses up at the drop of a hat, or the Eduardo Saverin who seems to know every number to do with facebook and uses formal letter writing style in email and sets up meetings with infinitely more powerful men apparently without batting an eyelid. 

As it was with Dustin, he’s both and more.

They go out to dinner - her, Dustin, Mark and Eduardo - and Dustin takes the seat next to Mark so that Amy has to sit by Eduardo. 

Who turns out to be really interesting, even if he does spend more time gesticulating with his fork than he does eating with it. Amy laughs at him and they laugh at Mark and then get into a really heated debate about language protection. And when Amy looks up an hour has passed and Dustin and Mark are looking over at them with matching, jealous frowns. 

Amy tilts her head at Dustin, _really?_ and he flicks a smile at her, _yeah, stupid, I know_. Then they glance over at Mark.

“What?” Mark says, frown deepening. “Why are you laughing at me?” 

Eduardo isn’t laughing, he’s staring over at Mark and Amy can practically see the pieces falling into place behind those eyes of his: mark-looking-at-wardo is as dustin-looking-at-amy. It looks like that is more of a shock to him than it was to Amy.

She remembers Dustin saying, “The thing about Eduardo is that he always feels like he has to fight for attention.”

Dustin says, “Oh, Magic Markers,” which is how Amy knows he’s noticed it too. Mark probably thinks Dustin uses nicknames just to be annoying, but really that’s just kind of a bonus to Dustin. The more elaborate the name, the more fond Dustin is feeling. 

Dustin slings an arm around Mark’s shoulders, and Eduardo is still staring at Mark like he’s something revelatory. Amy is pretty sure that their waiter thinks the four of them are, like, swingers or something. 

She gives Mark a sweet, mischievous smile and curls her hair around one finger, just to add to the effect.

Mark says, “So basically you two are together because no one else understands what goes on in your heads. Made-for-each-other crazy.” Amy’s heard Mark be sharper, meaner, but he’s been a beat behind recently. The beat it takes to glance at Eduardo.

Amy waits for Dustin to say something back, drop back into the easy back and forth that he and Mark share. But he doesn’t. Amy fills in with, “I think you’re seriously underestimating the level of Dustin’s crazy, Mark.”

In the midst of the laughing Dustin gives her a small, intimate - _oh,_ made for each other - smile. Amy really isn’t sure that one meal should contain this many people having this many emotions. 

Maybe there’s something in the water.

*

Eduardo spends his week in Palo Alto apparently charming half the business heads of the Bay Area, thanks to some well placed interns on this coast. The bond of President of a University Investor’s Club apparently runs deep, as does their propensity for wearing suits unnecessarily often. Amy spent her whole Freshman year teasing the guy who lived next door about that. Luckily he didn’t seem to hold that against her when she dropped by to talk about letting the love of facebook into his life and incidentally he should friend Eduardo Saverin. 

She doesn’t know exactly what Eduardo did, probably dazzled them with his smile and his cuff links and the old fall back of, yeah, three hundred grand in a summer.

It’s really helpful to Amy that she gets to see Eduardo in the morning with enormous hair and failing hard at the french press, Mark in the same clothes for three days, Chris and Dustin slap fighting for the game controller. Otherwise the levels of genius competence she’s surrounded by would be sort of terrifying.

Mark and Eduardo still fight about facebook all the time. 

Half of the time it’s dark and strange, leaves the whole house feeling like a totally different place to the silly summer place it was. The walls are thin, but the programmers mostly just wire in, raising huge noise cancelling headphones like shields. Amy gets the hell out of dodge when that happens, because she has better things to do than cower and wait it out. She’s spent enough time trapped in a battlefield, there’s no reason to put herself into the line of fire. 

The other times, though, they light each other up. There’s still yelling but the the house thrums with something like energy, like bright sparks. These fights draw people in, they take sides and draw furious diagrams and a few days afterwards something small but revolutionary gets added to the site. 

The night before Eduardo flies back out to New York, Amy gets up at 4am to get a drink of water and finds him and Mark at the long table, side by side at their laptops.

“Just going through everything,” Eduardo says. Of course he’s the one who feels the need to explain being awake at this time. For Mark this is not behaviour that needs rationalising. “Making sure we’re on the same page. Ready for our next step.”

Eduardo is almost as bad as Mark when he talks about facebook sometimes, so obviously emotionally invested in the thing, and it’s never as obvious as when he will look at the site and use the word “ours” and his voice goes fond and proud. She wonders if Mark’s noticed. 

Mark glances up, nods a hello at Amy and then his attention flicks right back to the screen. “Can you pass me the-” he starts. Eduardo hands over a piece of paper from the stacks in front of him and Mark takes it without looking. Then he passes Eduardo a cup of coffee from next to his laptop and Eduardo smiles into it as he takes a gulp, and then passes it back. 

Amy has absolutely no idea what to make of the two of them. 

*

“So, Sean Parker wants to meet us,” Eduardo says, and Amy stops hanging her laundry and picks up her cell from the table.

She says, “Tell me you aren’t messing with me, Saverin.” 

Eduardo laughs. “You haven’t heard the best part yet. He says he can get Mark in to see Peter Thiel.”

Amy nearly drops the phone. “Oh my god,” she breathes. “Wow. Okay. Seriously, if this is you dicking around I will _end you_.”

“Nope. He’s crashing with a friend of my friend Christy. Apparently he’s living out of his car or something. But he’s still someone who knows people, and you know what they say...” Amy does, she’s practically made the facebook mantra of connecting people her job. Amelia Ritter, pro-networker. She should get business cards printed.

Amy asks, “Why aren’t you telling Mark about this?” She knows Mark is going to be interested. Dustin likes to joke that they both have tech-crushes on Sean Parker.

“He wants in,” Eduardo says with a sigh. “If there was any other way to get us to someone like Thiel, you know? It really doesn’t look like Mark is going to move on the ads and I’m trying, god knows I’m trying but...”

“And now you’re going to bring in Sean Parker and probably Thiel as well,” Amy says, because she’s very sure of Eduardo’s place here, even if he isn’t. Even if that’s how Mark makes him. Mark has never really known uncertainty, he doesn’t see how he cultivates it in Eduardo, unthinkingly dismissive. 

“He seems like kind of a douchebag to me, to be honest,” Eduardo admits.

Amy laughs and says, “Sorry, it’s just, that’s what Dustin says about him. Anyway, you’ve got that off your chest now.”

Eduardo says, “Yeah, I’ll think of a more diplomatic way to put it for the meeting, I’m sure. I’ll call Mark, talk to Christy, set something up.”

*

Amy is doing some reading out by the pool when she hears Mark talking. A lot. That’s enough to make her go investigate.

Mark is gesturing at something in the kitchen with a beer bottle, and he says, “This is Amy.”

The guy he’s with turns to her and gives her a once over and god, is he actually checking her out, now, in the kitchen, with _Mark_? The fuck. “Hi, I’m Sean Parker,” he says. Okay, so, Amy would like to be wearing something more than a tee shirt over her swimsuit right now but she can work with it.

“Hello,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’ve been a fan of your work for a while.”

Sean takes her hand and says, “Enchanté, madame.” Possibly he’s being ironic or possibly he thinks that’s actually charming, which is kind of bizarrely sweet.

“Madamezelle, s’il vous plait. Je suis une jolie, jeune fille, ne c’est pas?” Amy asks with a grin.

Sean says, “Ah, a French major.”

“Oui,” Amy says.

Sean looks over at Mark with a familiar expression. It’s the one guys wear before they’re about to say something like, “Arts students, man.” He actually says, “And what does a French major do for you, Mark? I thought it was all hackathon vetted Zuckerberg-lites? Parker-lites, in fact.” 

It’s a easy trick, look at us, look at how similar we are. Not like Them. Doesn’t matter who They are, it just matters that you make your point and get the person on side.

Mark smirks and takes a pull of his beer. “Oh, I’d love to have nothing but programmers, but it turns out a company cannot live live by code alone. They have their uses.”

“Maybe that’s where you went wrong before,” Amy says to Sean, leaning against the counter. “You know, with _all_ those companies that didn’t work out.”

“I’m pretty sure Napster didn’t end because of a lack of French speakers,” Sean says. He doesn’t seem pissed at her, exactly. “And it worked out pretty much exactly how I wanted it to.”

Amy pulls herself up to sit on the countertop. Maybe he is a douchebag, but this is a story she wants to hear.

*  
Mark is racing Dustin to complete a project for the next code push, sitting opposite each other at the end of the table while the interns pretend not be watching. They’ve been at it for about two hours. 

Amy has taken her laptop to lie on the sofa, keeps her facebook page open in a window and the live stats page that Mark threw together for her in another. 

Sean throws the front door open with a bang and a flourish. “S’up bitches. And Amy,” he says. He waits until everyone is looking at him. “Let me tell you about the meeting we’ve got next week. It’s _the_ meeting, Peter Thiel wants us to see us, this will be huge, Mark, this is it, he’s going to invest-”

“Wardo will want to be there,” Mark says. 

Sean stops mid-flow. He looks at Mark for a few seconds. “Yeah, no, absolutely. Of course, Wardo and I have been making some plans. He’s got some good ideas. That Little Big Horn trick - smart.” 

Mark nods. 

“You can pick ‘em, Zuckerberg,” Sean says, which is sort of a masterstroke. Sean has spent the last few days forcing a place for himself in the house, talking about parties and dotcoms and his favourite topic, Sean Parker. But he’s clearly also taken the time to work out the way things work around here. Mark is difficult in a lot of ways but simple in this one. Mark likes it when you say he’s right. And now Sean has worked something else out. Mark likes it when you say Eduardo’s smart.

 

*

At first it looks like they haven’t got the money; Eduardo stalks past everyone out into the garden and Mark follows close behind. But then Sean bounds in, wraps an arm around Dustin and says, “Half a million, baby. There’s champagne in the car. Tonight, my children, we party _hard_.”

Dustins whoops. Amy sits sort of dazed for a second, because, that’s - five hundred thousand dollars for _facebook_ \- it’s unreal. Dustin wriggles out from under Sean’s arm and pulls her up into something that’s half hug and half a really faily spin. 

Someone is sliding the glass doors to the yard shut, but not before they hear, “I’m the CFO, Mark.” 

“Well maybe you should _act like it._ ”

Amy looks at Dustin, her hair still falling over her face from being spun and she sees the wince. 

“Hey,” she says, putting her hand on his cheek.

Dustin says, “You know what? Fuck ‘em. Tonight is the night for drunken revels. Hard earned revels, I might add. They’ll work it out.” Amy isn’t sure whether he believes that or not. 

Someone pops a champagne cork and half the room dive for their open laptops, Dustin included, and Amy feels champagne rain down on her, and wonders.

*

“One way or another, someone is pinning someone to a wall,” she says absently to Dustin one day. They’re taking the train to meet her friend Beth for lunch, and Amy has promised herself that she’s not going to talk about facebook for at least a half hour during it. 

“How many ways can someone pin someone to a wall?” Dustin asks. Amy stares pointedly at him and waits for the light to dawn. Dustin’s face goes through a complicated set of emotions. 

Amy pats him on the shoulder.

“I don’t want to have these thoughts about Mark and Wardo, ugh, oh my god, Mark is like... I’ve seen... I don’t want to think about him...” Dustin waves his hands about.

“Pinning?” Amy suggests, filling each the word with much innuendo as she possibly can.

Dustin groans and puts his head on her shoulder. “You’re lucky that I luh - that I like you, Amy Ritter.”

“Yup, because I’m going to carry on making sex jokes about your friends, and possibly _to_ your friends, for the foreseeable future.”

Dustin says, “It’s really unfair that you don’t find their asshole ways intimidating at all, and I’m freaking out about lunch with a perfectly nice girl.”

“You should probably try not to, all my school friends will be back when term starts, you can’t be freaking out the whole time,” Amy points out. “Um. I mean...” She’s been avoiding bringing it up because Dustin’s been avoiding bringing it up. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not like she doesn’t think about it. The fact is that Dustin’s due to go back to Harvard in a matter of weeks, now. She tells herself that she’s just trying to live in the moment but in her heart of hearts she knows that it’s more like fear.

Dustin says, “Er, yeah. I was gonna... I mean. This isn’t... But...” He lifts his head off of her shoulder, rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “I’m probably going to stay.”

Amy stares at him. 

Dustin scrunches up his nose. “I mean, it’s only Harvard, right?” he says. 

Amy says, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for months,” because she doesn’t want to be a person who makes out on public transit.

Dustin smiles at her, still kissing-close. He says, “This is... I can’t do my job from Cambridge and I... I really like it here.” 

Amy knows she’s sort of just sitting there grinning at him. She knows you can’t keep a summer; the days will get shorter, the freckles will fade, but this, _this_ she can have and hold onto.

Then the better, more rational part of her brain kicks in. “Are you dropping out for good? Have you talked to your parents about this? I’m guessing Mark is staying, what about Chris? Wardo?”

“Mark - yes, Chris - no, Wardo - who knows.” Dustin does a one shoulder shrug. “Probably not.”

“How Mark doing with that? Amy asks. Eduardo’s texts have been filled with enough misery recently that she’d probably call them maudlin if she was that way inclined, but never everything that she can get a grasp on. Of course he has been quietly freaking out about staying on the East Coast while everyone else pioneers out west. Eduardo’s never been one to miss out on a gold rush.

Dustin grimaces and says, “Yeah, not great.” Amy shuffles as close as she can, crossing her legs and hooking her ankle over his shin. “He’s become really interested in finding us a new place. So obviously something is seriously up.”

“He’s looking for somewhere with a pool, right? Obviously that’s the only reason I drop round.”

Dustin says, “It’ll be winter, why would we want a pool?”

Amy pats his knee. “Oh baby.”

“Is the lure of my beautiful face not enough?” Dustin asks, with an expression of great tragedy. The sunshine keeps flashing into the train, making his hair light up around his face, and his smile is bright and familiar and just for her.

She says, “Well, maybe we can negotiate something, Mr Moscowitz,” and can’t seem to remember why she wasn’t always kissing him. 

*

Amy has Carmen laughing down the line at her about her life, which is pretty much what’s she’s come to expect. “Your apartment is like a breeding ground for horror, Aim. It’s amazing that you haven’t lost all of your clothes in there.” 

“I think there’s something under the bed that lives on tank tops,” Amy says mournfully. “Four in a week isn’t normal.”

Carmen says, “Maybe you should bait it out with a tee shirt on a stick. I nominate that ratty green one that you’ve been promising to throw out for years.” She dissolves back into laughter.

Amy sighs at her. “This is why Dustin thinks you’re scary. I tell him these stories which all end ‘And then she mocked my problems with hysterical giggling.’”

“Aww, are you worried he’s not going to like us?” Carmen asks. 

Amy says, “Of course not! You’re awesome, why wouldn’t he? I love you, he’ll love you and vice versa, everyone’s going to be in love and in California, wonderful, because, did I mention he’s staying, and facebook is getting an _office_ and...” She takes a breath. _In love_ and in California. 

“Well, shit,” Carmen says. “Exhale, Amy.” 

Amy does, closing her eyes for a second. “I’m not sure what I thought this would be when I started but it was not... whatever the hell this is.”

Sometimes she thinks that she could do more for them, both the company and the mess that is that house. But she’s not going to be the girl who rides coattails to success and she’s sure as hell not being another person who gets sucked into that vortex of a house.

She’s been to enough meetings, read enough literature, and she made that decision too young to know that she was making it. Stay clear of those situations, they will pull you in, and pull you under, and she’s come too close to drowning in someone else’s disaster before. 

“You’ve got it so bad you don’t know when you’ve got it good,” Carmen tells her with a laugh, comfortable and familiar like an arm slung around her shoulder, and Amy breathes out, slow and steady.

*

Dustin has apparently been waiting for her because she’s about to open the front door when he slips out of it and closes it firmly behind him, keeping hold of the handle.

“Hi?” Amy says.

“Hello,” Dustin replies. That appears to be all he’s got.

“Darling Amelia! Why don’t I explain to you why we’re in the front yard,” Amy prompts. “Come on, Dustin, this is no good unless you remember your part.”

Dustin leans forwards, both hands still gripping the handle behind him, and swings on his heels. “If you go inside, Mark is going to tell you all sorts of things, and Chris gets here tomorrow and there’s never going to be a point where we’re alone and I’m not being upstaged. So we have to stay out here for the time being.” He pulls himself back up again. “That’s the thing. That is what the thing is. Well, no, the thing is that I love you. I’m sort of really in love with you and if I don’t say it now I’m going to blurt it out somewhere bad like I nearly did on the train or when a lot of other stuff is going on.”

“Really sort of?” Amy says while she waits for the rest of her brain to come back online properly.

Dustin grins unashamedly. “Kind of absolutely.”

Amy steps into him, crosses her hands behind his neck. “You’re lucky I love you,” she tells him. He threads his hands in under her shirt, thumbs the dip at the bottom of her spine, says, “Yeah, I know.”

“You could have gone with truly or madly or deeply. Any of the classics really,” she says, caught on the way his eyes are so easy to read, relieved and happy.

Dustin says, “Why are we still talking? We could be kissing. Right now.”

Amy laughs, pulls him closer. She says, “You won’t stop smiling and I don’t want to kiss your teeth.” She presses a kiss to the corner of his broad, grinning mouth, and arches a little as he skims her skin with his fingers.

“I thought you loved me,” Dustin says, with a pout. 

Amy kisses him, she knows she’s being played or at the very least teased but still. “I do,” she breathes and she can’t seem to make it a joke. She kisses Dustin a little too hard, definitely gets his teeth instead of his lips more than once but she _does_ and it can’t be said enough, with words or without.

Dustin lets his head drop back to the door. “Come on, we should go let me be upstaged by Mark. Again.”

“Oh please,” Amy says. It’s more of a “puh-leeze” really, which is a little more Valley Girl than she’d like. It makes Dustin smile, anyway.

She takes his hand and pulls him inside. Mark is handing out beers. “I found us a new house,” he says triumphantly, throwing Dustin a bottle over someone’s head. Dustin hands it to Amy and holds out his arm to catch another. He and Mark have a pretty good routine with that kind of thing.

“And we have a moving in date for the offices,” Mark adds.

Amy keeps trying her hide her smile behind her beer bottle but she’s not sure it’s working.


End file.
